Righting the reader : conflagration and civil war in Lucan's De Bello Civili

Abstract

Lucan's first simile compares Rome's descent into civil war with the stoic phenomenon of conflagration. This simile is here read against the tradition of classical literature treating conflagration. The implications of this heritage are weighed against the simile's context and the themes and narrative techniques appearing throughout the epic. The simile is programmatic of Lucan's tendency to extend ambiguous hermeneutic possibilities and in its declaration of a conspicuously defective equation between subject and simile.